Founded in Taos by Nancy Pantaleoni and Stephen Parks, ARTlines was a lively and influential journal of northern New Mexico arts. Included here are interviews with leading artists and art figures published between 1980 and 1985.

Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Using saws, chisels and grinders,
Bob Haozous creates sensuous stone, metal and wood forms that combine pointed
social commentary with an abiding concern for beauty and grace. Haozous shares
a love of polished, finished surfaces with his famous sculptor father, Allan
Houser, but there the father-son similarity ends. While Houser's work is the
epitome of lyrical, Native American ideals of beauty, harmony and pride,
Haozous is concerned with the experience and the meaning of the contemporary
Indian individual, and his sculpture often has a satirical or ironic bite.

Haozous is articulate and
soft-spoken. When he talks, there's a sense about him of restrained intensity
and enthusiasm--not that anything's going unsaid, but that words are delivered
with a curious lack of passion. Perhaps he saves the passion for his work.

We talked in his studio, atop a hill
a few miles west of Santa Fe.

I just returned
from a show in Texas, and these people said, "Why are you doing this kind
of work? It's not Indian art!"

What
do they think Indian art is?

Decorative. No
philosophy, no religion, just an extension of Indian craft. The whole subject
kind of burns me up.

Let's
ease into it then. What's the source of your art?

In one way or another,
I think most of my art is based on my childhood. I was born in Los Angeles, but
I grew up in Utah. This was during the '50s, what they called the `termination'
period, when the government sent Indian kids away from the reservations to
schools, cut off their hair, forbid them to speak their own language. My mother
and father both worked at one of those Indian schools, in northern Utah, but I
went to a public school, and that was strange. The kids of the Indian employees
were separate from the anglos, separate from the Indian kids in the Indian
school...but that experience was instrumental in what I'm doing know. It gave
me a distance. The people I grew up with, the ones my friends and I respected
for their wit, their intelligence, their sensitivity--they either became
artists or alcoholics. Some of them are dead now. The others, to survive,
totally divorced themselves from their Indian culture.

As soon as we could, we all left.
I'm finding that a number of my old friends are beginning to congregate here in
Santa Fe--Gail Bird and Yazzie Johnson, who are jewelers, Robert Shorty, a
sculptor, Harold Littlebird, who's a poet and potter, and my brother, Phil
Haozous, another jeweler.

Can
you be specific about how your early experience has been reflected in your art?

Well, the
experience wasn't urban, it wasn't reservation. It was a contemporary setting
where we could pretty much make our own rules. I had a generalized Indian
awareness, and what I'm doing now is to try and generalize in the statements I
make with my work. Rather than express any particular tribe's ways or rules or
symbols, I try and express the general Indian awareness.

How
do you characterize that awareness?

The non-Indian
philosophy is based on the Western tradition of man as being superior to
everything else on earth. The Native American says man is an equal part of
everything. To the Indian, God couldn't look like man. I'm not a religious man.
On the other hand, I feel I have a responsibility to somehow privately form my
own religion.

You
whitewashed some of your early sculptures. Was that intended as a literal
symbol?

Yes. That's the
general American idea that if you can't control something, manipulate it,
whitewash it, it's not right. So I started painting things white. I did a wood
piece once called Initiation, which
showed a lady holding a mask. She looked Indian, but you weren't sure, and the
mask was painted white. There were these beautiful cracks in the wood and in
the woman, and the guy who bought the piece filled them in. He whitewashed the
whole thing.

Did

you experience a lot of the whitewash while you were growing up?

I knew people in
Utah, Indian people, who joined the Mormon Church. They were taught that if
they really believed in the church, their skin would turn white. And those
people believed it. That's the power of the dominant culture. I've never made a
point of wearing Indian jewelry or clothes, because everyone has tried so hard
to look like an Indian. I don't care what people look like. Appearances are so
unimportant. When I was in school--California College of Arts and Crafts, in
Oakland--I wanted to go through as a neutral person. People thought I was
Italian. Teachers tried to get us to dig into our past, but at that time I was
more interested in intellectual and technical stimulus. The one time that I
painted an Indian, the teacher gave me an A, and it was the last painting I
did.

Has
your father had much influence on your work?

He gave us clay
when we were kids, critiqued our drawings. But he was aware of the harm that
could be caused by pushing us, and he didn't. He looks traditional, but he's
very tolerant. I think the most important thing I've learned from my dad.... In
his work, everything is intentional. I admire that. It's a professionalism I
want, too. I want control. Many people stop working on a piece too soon. They
stop when they think the piece is salable, rather than when it's finished.
That's why you see so much rough rock in sculpture. They're not finished.

Most
of your figures are women.

They always have
been. I started doing degraded Mother Earth images. Indians view Mother Earth
as the live earth, anglos view her as a woman with big breasts, big hips, a
very dominant woman. So I did the anglo attitude. When Indian societies were
destroyed, it was the men's roles that were ravaged. In my tribe [Apache], for
example, the men were hunters, raiders, and the women took care of the
families. When the men lost the ability to do the hunting, there was nothing
left. The woman became very dominant--luckily, because they held things
together.

But
aren't you often sculpting Anglo women?

I decided I
would do Indian art that portrays non-Indians. So, yes, I do anglos, I expose
them, in a strange way. The men all have a gun, a symbol of a false sense of
manhood. Having a gun is like using technology to rule rather than instinct. On
the women, I often put necklaces, like the hippies in the '60s wore. They'd put
on a necklace and think they were relating to the noble savage. But they didn't
relate to who the Indian really was! With my women, I was dealing with the
surface decoration to show how all this stuff affects the stone. But the stone,
its essence, is still there, underneath, and showing through all that other
stuff.

"M," painted wood, 60 inches tall

You're
known for your stone carvings, yet you also have done wood panels like this one
[titled M, a frontal female nude, with stars, hearts, and pictograph-like
cowboys]--carved in relief and colored--that have the impact of paintings.

I guess I had a
lot to say with that one. I wanted to put an anglo, or an anglo-looking woman
in a Southwest landscape. She's a friend who...just say she's
dissatisfied--with herself, with the landscape, the place. I put her with her
soldiers, her ten little white men. She's naked, offering you everything. She's
aggressive. The rabbit next to her is timid. He's in the environment. She's a
beautiful shell, easily obtained and empty. The hearts--they promise true love,
what she thinks she wants. The piece is a hinged triptych, like an altar piece.
She stands on top of the hill, blocking the environment, the beauty, offering
something very unimportant. She's like the beautiful people who come here,
thinking the landscape is so beautiful, and then they put a house on top of the
hill and ruin the landscape.

All
the images in your work seem to have very particular meanings. What are the
chrome balls you've added to some of your stone sculptures?

I did that first
in Woman with Necklace. First of all,
I like the contrast between marble and chrome. People hated them, so I carved
planes and clouds into the surface of her dress. She's till a Navajo woman, but
she's controlled by her new environment. No matter where you are, you see
planes in the air. The chrome balls are technology, but they are beautiful
forms, too.

Sometimes
your symbolism is pointed, but your forms are almost always very lush,
beautiful. Some of the women, especially, are reminiscent of Lachaise.

I've always
admired him. His forms are so simple, yet so difficult to do. They're earth
forms, the simple forms. It's what I want. Doing sculpture, especially Native
American sculpture, it's so easy to rely on the decorativeness and forget the
forms.

And
what about the pieces that appear to be nothing but form, the donut-shaped
sculptures?

I think of them
as Zen forms, and I don't know how any of this we've been talking about relates
to them. They don't need my signature. What's the old thing--artists are afraid
of their death? These pieces aren't like that. They're not related to
immortality, to ego. They don't need me. They're themselves. They are mine, but
they're anonymous, too. I'd like to just bury them, and hope that someday
someone would dig them up and wonder about them. I like them, I guess, because
they're instinctual.

What's
the connection with Zen?

I love archery,
and I was reading Zen and the Art of Archery, and I was trying to understand
how sometimes an arrow would go just where it was supposed to go. I began
looking for the same thing in art, and somehow this form symbolizes that for
me.

How
did you find it?

I did a carving
once of a happy man, and he was holding up this shape, which looked like a
donut. I loved the shape and how it worked as a symbol.

Does
it have a specific meaning?

I've used it
both as a female symbol and a symbol of the universe. My work has been going in
two different directions--one is these universal symbols, which I don't really
understand yet, and the other is representational sculpture, using Native
American symbols and ideas. Eventually I think they'll come together.

Individuality
is important to you, but you come from such a tribal, community-oriented
background.

I want to
combine the two. I try to relate how Indians were by how I am. That
individuality, expressing that, is important to me. It's important that I do
what pleases me. Native American's have tended to do things just because it
pleases them, like I do with my donuts--not for money, but because it pleases
me. Unfortunately, that's changing for many Indian artists. They're trying to
describe, to explain, to please someone else, and the work ends up decorative,
with no individuality. I'd like to see Indian artists refer more to themselves,
using history as a reference. That would be cultural art, and art has to be
cultural.

Do
you find that money is a factor in the production of so much decorative art?

The goal for
most artists is financial reward, and that's a shame. But the fact that we have
no cultural art says we don't want it yet. Two of my donuts used to stand out
in front of the gallery, and everyone had to touch them, which was wonderful,
but after a while, some kids dumped them, turned them over. It was kind of an
anti-art statement by them, which I can certainly understand. This society
isn't ready for fine art.

But it's not the artists fault. I
often feel pressure from critics and gallery people to keep things simple,
decorative, salable. They don't want to be challenged or strained. My White
Buffalo, for example. People liked the form, but they didn't like it when I put
the hole in it and added the hand. The hole is a bullet hole, and the hand
symbolized the signature of man. It's man who's killing himself. But it's not
that simple for me, either. The hole is also a Zen hole. It causes you to
wonder.

Yes, but it
takes years, experience.... It's something for older artists. They have no
choice. They have all that culture behind them. My grandfather, who had ridden
with Geronimo, was an Indian sheriff, and when I was about six years old, he
used to shoot with us. He had this very particular way of shooting. He'd snap
his arm down real fast and shoot, while we always extended our arms and aimed
so carefully. I could never understand why he shot that way. Then I was out
riding the other day, and I saw a rabbit. I tried to aim an imaginary gun at
it, and I found that there was no way I could aim while riding. The only way to
shoot from horseback is to snap your arm down as my grandfather had done. He
had hundreds of years of experience and culture behind him, and I was too dumb
to see it.

Are
you an Indian artist?

Of course,
though my definition might be a little different than some others. If I deal in
my art with my environment, my reality, it reflects my culture. And my culture
is Indian. But it is my culture, not my parents' or my grandparents' culture. I
don't have my grandfather's eyes, thank goodness. You can't go back.

Friday, November 9, 2012

Eugene
Dobos is a Taos painter and sculptor with boundless energy and enthusiasm for
life and art.He is a bluntly honest and
articulate conversationalist, and any discussion is punctuated by expressive
gesturing and steady pacing.Energy
crackles around him as he hurls himself into an argument or painting.He speaks with a magisterial boom, relishing
the delivery of each word.

He
was born in Dnepropetrovsk, Russia, on Christmas Day.When he was eleven years old he nearly lost
his life:a live grenade he was
tinkering with exploded in his hand.He
lost one eye and all his fingers except two.Dobos makes the loss seem inconsequential.He pursues such active interests as cross-country
skiing, throwing and collecting boomerangs, breeding and racing homing pigeons,
gathering fire wood, shooting skeet and collecting Mannlicher Schonauer rifles.

His
evolution as an artist has been marked by phases that appear radically
different from each other, but share a common thread of humor, vulnerability, pain
and love of beauty.The paintings that
launched his success were somewhat cynical portrayals of human foibles, often
featuring angels, devils, or members of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. His targets were pompous and inflated egos,
and snobbery of all forms.After nearly
two decades of such sly prickings, Dobos put down his brush, laid himself down
on the living room couch, and after a year of counting vigas he got up and
devoted himself to sculpture.He created
puzzling and provocative juxtapositions of familiar objects that tweaked our
expectations, challenged our prejudices of the way we see.Some of the pieces were large and
velvet-covered; others were small, mirror-lined boxes, often containing
flowers.One, a mirrored box which
contained a dark brown velvet rose placed above a damaged brass bullet shell,
had a disturbing symbolism that echoed Dobos’s interest in illusion and touched
on such varied associations as coffins, sex, beauty, castration, and
death.From the boxes Dobos returned to
painting, though his focus was still on flowers.He painted large canvases of roses, lilies,
and hollyhocks.A trip to Arizona led to
an interest in cacti, and he painted them as abstract, phallic shapes, with a
painterly mélange of color.

He
is now experimenting with Krylon spray paint and stencils, painting multiple
shadows of dead aspen leaves and hollyhocks across a silver surface.Colors are subtle, interlacing with velvety
blacks and grays, and evaporating like smoke.He calls them “my charred flowers . . . look at how gracefully they die
. . .” The effect is bittersweet.

About
his approach to art, Dobos says:“That’s
my repertoire.It’s like writing
music:a composer has more than one
song, and I have more than one in me, too.It’s all playing.Spray paint is
my new toy.”The following conversation
with Lois Gilbert began with a discussion of that the interview should be
about:

I just read the interview you did
with Marian Love for the Santa Fean in 1979.Did you like the way
it was written?

My
God . . . that was incredible.We drank
two bottles of champagne and I just raved about everything.I thought she would edit a little, but she
wrote down the whole conversation—it was insane!It was fun.

I like the way she portrayed you,
as a renaissance man with a lot of joie de vivre.

Well, I don’t want to talk about any of the
old stuff.No history.That’s all water under the bridge.Let’s just talk about me and my work as we
are now.I’m a hell of an interesting
guy, you know.

O.K.Why do you have so much work here?Are you planning a show soon?

No,
no!There’s too much promotion going
on.Too much Madison Avenue.Artists should stay home and work.

So you stay and home and come up
with a new batch of Doboses every two or three years?

It
stops a lot of people.But you’re
right:when you paint for money, you
look in the mirror in the morning and it says, “There’s a hypocrite.”That’s not a good feeling—I don’t care how
much money you make.When I get up in
the morning my mirror says, “There’s a good man.”That’s worth everything.

Isn’t an artist entitled to some
financial security, though?

It’s not true to art!Security and art are like oil and
vinegar.Art is revolutionary.Artists are a bunch of malcontents.

What about Renoir?He was successful, married and happy.Was he a revolutionary?

Yes.A revolutionary is a malcontent.Someone who is dissatisfied with the status
quo.A normal person will say, “Gee,
that’s a beautiful mountain.”An artist
can’t leave it alone.He will say,
“Yeah, that’s a beautiful mountain, but wait until I get done with it!”That is the process.And that’s revolutionary.

That seems like egomania!

Believe me:it takes a lot of ego to take a clean canvas and screw it up.

Some artists are trying to get away
from that ego-oriented art, though.One
of Andy Warhol’s famous quotes was, “Wouldn’t you love to be a machine?”

Well,
I could be a choo-choo train for that matter.But now you’re talking about what kind of revolutionary you are.The process is a subversive process.The process is the kick.By-product is by-product.If you sell it you sell it, if you don’t you
don’t.But the process of inventing and
bringing things forth—that’s where it’s at.

What is your process?

There
are no two people who proceed alike.But
I am very much concerned with man in the contemporary world, now.Each generation has a unique dilemma.Resolutions of past dilemmas are applicable
in part, but anyone who calls himself a contemporary artist is someone dealing
with contemporary problems.Artists have
a finger on the pulse of society.They
say, “What’s happening?”It’s a
wonderful phrase.“What’s happening!”When Russia was on the brink of revolution in
1917, there was total chaos.So what do
the Russian artists start doing?Russian
Constructivism.If you cannot achieve
order in society, the need for order is still there.So they constructed tidy little worlds of
their own.It was very original, but
unfortunately short-lived.It was the
great beginning of Russian Modern Art.But then Stalin took over and stomped it all out.The outlook of the Communist state on art is
completely different from ours.No
matter what you do, it’s for the State.In that climate a truly creative mind cannot exist.

So the process is like making
whisky.Artists have a facility to
distill the confusion of the world, and synthesize it—crystalize it—and bring
it forth.Have you ever watched people
make whisky?You take all the mash, and
it’s the most goddamn smelly awful crap you ever saw . . . and then it comes
out this exquisite Scotch.

If an artist synthesizes
contemporary dilemmas, that sounds political to me—and limited in its appeal.

You
can look at it in political terms.Or
religious terms.Jesus Christ was not
content with the status quo.So you
don’t have to be politically oriented to be a revolutionary.

But how do your paintings distill
contemporary dilemmas?

Well, if I have to explain that, my paintings
are falling on deaf ears, or they’re falling apart.

Falling on deaf ears?Why not blind eyes?

Blindness
is too terrible to even mention.No, I
don’t think paintings should be explained, especially by an artist.

Sunflower, construction, 24x24x8 inches

Please.

Well
. . . I’ve been going to the Taos Ski Valley for many years.In the last few years I’ve noticed that the
spruces on one side of the canyon are turning brown.They are dying.I’m not a bleeding-heart conservationist, but
I started looking into it and discovered it’s being caused by carbon monoxide.And the Saguaro cacti are falling dead in the
desert because of carbon monoxide.I
think it’s a very contemporary dilemma.

Aren’t your paintings commenting on
death rather than carbon monoxide?

Of course!But carbon monoxide brought it to my attention.It’s part of the collective
consciousness.It comes down to dichotomies:life and death, good and evil, yin-yang.But we are in a new dilemma:Mother Nature’s breasts are running out of
milk.And I think of this as I do my
work.

Could I watch you paint a painting?

Sure.I prepared the backgrounds on these with
about five coats of silver spray paint.It’s a very elusive surface.It
looks flat now, but when you move to the side—

It shimmers.I like the texture of the morilla board under that silver.The dimples look like waves on an ocean.Do you use anything but stencils and spray
paint?

No.One of these days I’m going to blow myself
up, keeping these spray cans by the stove.It’s ironic; I’m using these spray cans to paint about pollution, and
they’re destroying the ozone layer.Now
we want this to be ghostly.In the early
morning, when dreams and reality fuse . . . that’s the feeling I want.That’s the best time to create.This is the opposite action of action
painting.It’s meditative.

Do you meditate?

No.Why should I?

You can induce dreams.

My
God! I live in them!No, I tried it once and I got scared.It got out of control . . . Beautiful,
eh?Sometimes you almost have to will it
on there.

You’re going to cover up all that
nice black?

In
order to create something, you have to destroy something. In order to get fed, you have to kill
something, right?It’s silly to be a
vegetarian.People say they won’t kill
animals, so they kill plants instead.What’s the difference?They’re
all living things.

You must remember, we are
playing.In order to play you have to
take risks.If we want security we can
go to Brooks Brothers and buy a tweed jacket.Come hell or high water we know we can go to Brooks Brothers.If you’re still insecure, vote
Republican.Those who know how to play are
artists.Those who cannot play—collect.

It looks
like fun.

It
is fun.Why do you think artists get
hooked on this?I consider myself a
paint junkie.Now I’m a goddamn Krylon
junkie . . . You might think I know what I am doing.You are wrong!Now, let’s have a rehearsal on this piece of
paper.You are sitting on my stencil,
Lois.

Sorry.Does it bother you to have someone watching?

I love an audience!I love to show off.

Death and the Maiden, spray paint and stencil

Are you really thinking about
death?

Of course.This is Death and the Maiden.How do you make death more deadly?Introduce a maiden, a virgin, an unfulfilled
life.(Dobos bumps the stencil, it moves
slightly and leaves a tiny smear.)But
you do not put blemishes on maidens.Son
of a bitch!

The world is ready for
romanticism.Where else can we go from
Ellsworth Kelly?But don’t get me wrong,
I love Ellsworth Kelly.

Is death
a part of your romanticism?

Sure!It’s like God.You can make it as abstract and romantic as
you want.One fellow went to Heaven and
came back.His friends asked him, “Did
you see God?”He said, “Sure.”They said, “What does He look like?”He said, “She’s black.”

Did thoughts about death go into
those huge flowers you painted last year?

No.

When did you start thinking about
it?

When
I went through my mid-life crisis, that’s when!I realized you gotta cut out the bullshit.But nature devised death to be merciful.I don’t know why people are afraid of
it.Let’s see what we can do before it
comes.I choose to be a revolutionary,
and the result of my revolution is a state of elevation.After Handel wrote The Messiah he said, “I went to Heaven and saw God Himself.”That is what the process is like.In making art, man elevates his spirit and
celebrates his royalty.

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About Me

Owner and director of Parks Gallery, Taos since 1993. He has written several books, including "Jim Wagner: An American Artist" (Rancho Milagro Productions, 1993), and "R.C. Gorman: A Profile" (NY Graphics/Little Brown, 1981). He's written introductions to "Melissa Zink: The Language of Enchantment" (New Mexico Magazine Press, 2006), and "Douglas Johnson:A Painter's Odyssey" (Clear Light Publishing, 1998). Parks co-founded ARTlines in 1980, a journal on arts in Santa Fe and Taos he edited through 1985. A Taos resident since 1973, Parks is also an actor, director and playwright.